Thank you in advance to Celadon Books for sending me an ARC to review! *Read below for a major trigger warning not mentioned in the trigger warning section*
This one was a tough one, so I’m settling on 3.5 stars. I was really enjoying the beginnings of the story and found it to be less tedious than other police procedurals. The style was reminiscent of Alex North in many ways.
I liked our main protagonist Alex, and felt he was a good “flawed” character to lead us off. However, some of the characterizations felt a bit off, for example, Alex and Morgana are British, but you would never even know without some very obvious descriptions (Morgana’s outfits… wtf).
Isabel was interesting in her own way, and I appreciated how she attempted to handle Ethan in the beginning. The rest of the characters started blending together, and it felt obvious that we were being thrown all these different backstories and names to throw us off the trail.
Now, the reason it’s 3.5 stars and yes, DNF’d @ 40%. Enter our serial killer. He’s introduced to us in small bits - in the present day as he begins stalking and killing a new batch of kids - and in the past where we see a glimpse of his traumatizing childhood that led him to where he is today.
I won’t lie, these scenes were good. However, the author mentioned a few trigger warnings in the introduction, but somehow left out the biggest one of all?? (Incest). After some pointlessly graphic examples of this, I tried to stomach another 50 pages, but just couldn’t get it out of my head whenever the story looped back to the killer.
I’m pretty bummed, and obviously won’t continue. Overall this was well-written and a fresh take on a saturated genre.
All opinions are my own, thank you again to Celadon!
This one was a tough one, so I’m settling on 3.5 stars. I was really enjoying the beginnings of the story and found it to be less tedious than other police procedurals. The style was reminiscent of Alex North in many ways.
I liked our main protagonist Alex, and felt he was a good “flawed” character to lead us off. However, some of the characterizations felt a bit off, for example, Alex and Morgana are British, but you would never even know without some very obvious descriptions (Morgana’s outfits… wtf).
Isabel was interesting in her own way, and I appreciated how she attempted to handle Ethan in the beginning. The rest of the characters started blending together, and it felt obvious that we were being thrown all these different backstories and names to throw us off the trail.
Now, the reason it’s 3.5 stars and yes, DNF’d @ 40%. Enter our serial killer. He’s introduced to us in small bits - in the present day as he begins stalking and killing a new batch of kids - and in the past where we see a glimpse of his traumatizing childhood that led him to where he is today.
I won’t lie, these scenes were good. However, the author mentioned a few trigger warnings in the introduction, but somehow left out the biggest one of all?? (Incest). After some pointlessly graphic examples of this, I tried to stomach another 50 pages, but just couldn’t get it out of my head whenever the story looped back to the killer.
I’m pretty bummed, and obviously won’t continue. Overall this was well-written and a fresh take on a saturated genre.
All opinions are my own, thank you again to Celadon!